Burton Ellis was born on September 13, 1903 in Troy, Idaho. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Spokane, Washington where his father worked with the railroad as an engineer. When Ellis was eight years old, the family moved to Iowa to escape the "big city" lifestyle of Spokane. In Iowa, Ellis attended a one-room schoolhouse, where he absorbed the lessons of his elder classmates, enabling him to take and pass a high school entrance exam at the age of eleven. The land boom in the west lured the Ellis family back to Idaho in 1918. Upon his return to his native Idaho, the fifteen-year-old Burton was a freshly minted high school graduate.

Humphrey, Idaho is located in the high country of the continental divide on the Idaho side of the Idaho/Montana border. The Ellis family took up ranching on their return to Idaho, and Burton quickly realized that he wanted nothing to do with the lifestyle. After a year of ranching, he spent a year working on road construction for a western entrance to Yellowstone National Park. Still desperate to avoid having to return to the family ranch, Burton secured an appointment to attend West Point but the initial physical exposed an irregular heartbeat and he was denied admission. Higher education still held the allure of escaping the ranch, so on his seventeenth birthday, in 1920, he enrolled at the University of Idaho. At registration the new students were required to put the first four letters of their hometown on their registration form; hence Ellis acquired the lifelong moniker "Hump" or "Humpy." "Hump" Ellis would attend the university sporadically during the following decade, often taking a few years off at a time to work in the oil fields of southern California and return to the ranch in Humphrey to help harvest the hay crop. In 1929, he received his bachelor's degree from Idaho in Political Science, and in 1933, he received his Juris Doctorate from the University of Idaho College of Law.

Ellis returned to the oil fields around Long Beach, California, where his experience and knowledge of the oil rigs assured him of work even amidst the Depression. While searching for a job on the oil rigs, Ellis was directed to the Texaco headquarters and hired immediately to handle the company's gas tax problems. While working there, he became the company's miscellaneous excise tax expert, and was transferred to Texaco's main office in New York City in 1938. From there, he volunteered for the Army to become a commissioned officer in 1942.

Upon commissioning, Lieutenant Ellis was tasked to serve as an instructor to new officers in the subject of military law. He was then sent to India, where he began his experiences as a trial lawyer, serving both as a defense and a prosecuting attorney for military personnel.

Near the end of the war, the destinies of Ellis, now wearing the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and seventy-four of Hitler's Waffen-SS troops would begin to converge. While Ellis was enrolling in the Judge Advocate General Advanced Course at the University of Michigan, the bodies of the massacred United States soldiers were being uncovered in an open pasture near Malmédy, Belgium. The massacre had occurred on December 17, 1944, during Germany's last major offensive of the war. The Germans were pushing hard towards Antwerp, Belgium, in an attempt to split the allied forces that were gaining strength and coordination since their landing on Normandy about six months prior. This last offensive effort of Germany is now know as the "Battle of the Bulge," and it required a fast attack by the Germans to assure its effectiveness. Hence, prisoners of war posed a logistical dilemma for units whose orders were to advance quickly. With this context in mind, several competing theories have arisen concerning the massacre. One posits that the orders given to the lead units in the offensive were to "take no prisoners." Another theory holds that the prisoners were being shuttled to the rear of the advancing German column, and that a chaotic, tense scene led to a regrettable accident of war. In any case, there is no doubt that after the assembly of Americans was shot en masse, individual German executioners walked among the dead and dying and shot at point blank range those who showed any signs of life. Seventeen Americans survived the massacre, either by feigning death or escaping into the nearby woods. Several survivors returned to Dachau to testify at the trial against those accused of firing the shots.

On May 1, 1945, about a week before the war in Europe officially ended, Lt. Col. Ellis reported to the War Crimes Group in Europe where he was initially assigned to the investigation section. Shortly thereafter, he was named the Chief of War Crimes Investigations, holding that billet for approximately one year. Towards the end of 1945, Lt. Col. Ellis was named the Chief of Operations, and placed in charge of trials and investigations. As the Chief of Operations, Lt. Col. Ellis supervised the assembling of the alleged perpetrators of the Malmédy Massacre, and the gathering of evidence. Later, Ellis would admit that "all the legitimate tricks, ruses, and stratagems known to investigators were employed-stool pigeons, witnesses who were not bona fide." Ellis also admitted the use of "mock trials," wherein an accused would be brought into a darkened room where men posing as judges would be sitting behind a table. Centered on the table would be a black cloth with a crucifix on it, all of which was flanked by two candles, providing the only light in the room. There would be a "prosecutor" and a "defense counsel," and the "mock trial" would use false evidence, false testimony and threats in order to secure confessions from the prisoners. In February, 1946, Ellis specifically requested and was appointed Chief Prosecutor of the trial.

The trial began on May 16, 1946. The accused were tried together, with numbers hanging from their necks to identify them. As accused war criminals, as distinct from the status of "prisoners of war," the typical due process rights designed to protect the integrity of pre-trial investigations and admissible evidence were greatly relaxed. Allegations of torture and abuse, as well as evidence gained by coercion and duress pursuant to the "mock trials" were introduced to preclude evidence offered by the prosecution team. Ellis admitted to the court in his opening statement that "mock trials" had been used to gain confessions, although he denied the allegations of physical abuse and torture. The court allowed the evidence. In all, seventy-three of the seventy-four accused were convicted. (The seventy-forth was extradited to France, tried there with the same evidence, and acquitted.) After the trial, Ellis resumed his position as Chief of Operations at Dachau.

Almost immediately after the trial, and in the years that followed, the Chief of the Defense Team, Colonel Willis Everett, brought a quixotic series of protests. Everett's tenacity in challenging the methods used by the prosecution eventually spawned a Senate investigation at which Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin played a dramatic if not decisive role, and a petition to the US Supreme Court. In response to Everett's campaign for justice, and partially due to the desire to see stability in West Germany in the emerging Cold War, military review boards eventually pardoned all of those convicted for the massacre. Oddly, it must also be noted that despite the pardon of the Germans, Ellis and the prosecution team were fully exonerated by the Senate investigation.

Although the record indicates that Burton Ellis and the prosecution team abused their prerogative, there are important lessons to be learned from the choice to pursue justice in this manner. Preeminent Malmédy author and historian James Weingartner notes: "Burton Ellis did his duty in an atmosphere approaching hysteria with personnel ill-suited to the task assigned him and according to legal standards which had received the highest sanction. His career and reputation suffered when those standards rightly came under attack." (James J. Weingartner, Crossroads of Death, p. 260 (University of California Press 1979)).

Burton Ellis retired from the Army as a Colonel in 1958. He continued to practice law in Merced, California, where he and his wife Dee also maintained a 170-acre almond orchard. Colonel Ellis died on December 29, 2000, preceded in death by his wife on May 23, 1998. In both his successes and his shortcomings, Burton Ellis has left an important legacy to the University of Idaho College of Law and to the international legal community at large, which again finds itself on the verge of prosecuting alleged war criminals. That legacy is best articulated by Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson when he admonished: